


Five Times Blue Tried to Pick Up (or at Least Talk To) Simon and One Time He Actually Did

by Paigers



Category: Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda - Becky Albertalli
Genre: 5+1, Canon Compliant, I really intended this to be crack, M/M, but it didn't go that way, pre-book
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 10:44:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11229312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paigers/pseuds/Paigers
Summary: Simon Vs. did not a 5+1 fic (on ao3) yet, and this had to be remedied.Just a bunch of Bram pining, really.





	Five Times Blue Tried to Pick Up (or at Least Talk To) Simon and One Time He Actually Did

**Author's Note:**

> [bansheee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bansheee/pseuds/bansheee) thought I was kidding.
> 
> Which, at the time, I was. I don't even know.
> 
> Also sort of inspired by her delightful [Awkward Silence Bram](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11070135).

_**Five Times Blue Tried to Pick Up (or at Least Talk To) Simon** _

 

**Freshman Year**

**(1)**

Could there be anything worse than your first day of high school?

Yes, Bram thought.

The worst thing was your first day of high school, in a new city where you knew precisely nobody.

No. He adjusted his opinion fifteen minutes into first period.

The worst thing was an ice breaker exercise, in your first period, on your first day of high school, in a new city where you knew precisely nobody.

When you were really shy.

You know the type. A single sheet of paper, lazily photo-copied (and probably ripped from some teaching-blog the night before), with a bunch of items like “Find someone who shares a birth month with you” and “Find someone who has been to Hawaii.” After each item was a line where you were expected to put someone’s name. This someone was supposed to be a stranger who you walked up to and started a conversation with after the teacher freed you all from your desks to roam around the classroom and mingle.

Of course, everybody inevitably crowded into groups with their friends and mocked the questions, rendering the activity pointless.

Not that Bram was above that, He would have done the same.

If, you know, it wasn’t his first day of high school, in a new city where he knew precisely nobody.

 

So when the sniffly, young, nervous-seeming teacher released them to “get to know each other,” Bram was at a loss. He made a point of taking extra time to get a pencil out of his backpack, then tentatively stood up and looked around.

Yep. Groups had already formed. Shocking.

But he couldn’t be the only straggler. There were always a few. New people or loners or whatever.

He didn’t see anything promising, so he looked for groups of two. Next best option. Or second-to-least worst option.

He set his sights on a couple in the corner, a boy and a girl. He could only really see the girl’s face. She had long, dark hair, with the very slightest hint of a pink streak, and she was chewing her pencil and frowning at her paper. The boy sitting opposite her had his back turned to him, but Bram could see that he had unruly, dark blonde hair. He could also see that he had a Hufflepuff shirt on.

He wore a Hufflepuff shirt on the first day of high school? Bram wouldn’t have dared wear his Ravenclaw one.

They had to be safe.

He approached them slowly. When he was a couple of feet away, the girl looked up at him and frowned (oh no), but just for a moment. “Hey,” she said.

“Hi,” Bram said.

The boy turned around and oh oh oh oh no no no.

Unlike the girl, the boy smiled. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Simon. This is Leah.”

“Hi,” Bram managed to squeak out.

There was a pause.

“Um, what’s your name?” Simon asked, his smile fading a bit. But he did not release eye contact. Bram looked down, feeling his cheeks redden.

Oh. Right.

“Bram,” Bram squeaked out.

“Oh, like the kid from _Game of Thrones_?” Leah asked.

“No,” Bram said. “With, er, with an ‘m,’ not an ‘n.’” This was a mistake that had been made a couple times since that show had become popular. (His mom would never let him watch something like that.)

There was a beat.

“Wanna sit?” Simon finally said, still staring.

He sat. “Are you new to Shady Creek?” Simon asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

“Yeah,” Bram managed. “Just moved a few weeks ago.”

Why was Simon still staring?

It’s not that Bram didn’t know he was probably…gay, or whatever. It was just still so uncomfortable when it was so evident to him. The boy, Simon (and of course he would have an unusual-ish, interesting name) was just…gah.

Not like his stepmom’s cousin, not that obviously, blatantly…gah. But he wore these really cute glasses. And he had these eyes that were the most interesting shade of gray, and he kept _looking_ at Bram, and his smile, and his Hufflepuff T-shirt didn’t hurt and just.

No, the worst thing was ACTUALLY…you get the point.

Bram was just glad Simon couldn’t read his mind. He wouldn’t have walked up to these two if it had been Simon he had seen from the front.

“Have you been to Hawaii, Bram?” Simon asked, after yet another awkward pause.

“No,” Bram said. “Um, were either of you born in January?”

The interaction continued like that for five more painful minutes, before the teacher called the class to attention. And Bram didn’t talk to either of them again in any capacity for weeks. And even then, it was about school work.

Ice breaker, Schmice-breaker.

**(2)**

The second half of freshman year was definitely better and less lonely than the first, mostly because of soccer. The first friend Bram had made on the team had been Nick Eisner, also a freshman, who he had met at the JV team’s first practice.

And Nick was cool and all, but, like Bram, he was quiet. Not shy, really, but definitely quiet. And it’s hard for quiet people to get to know each other without an extroverted translator.

But that translator seemed to be rapidly taking the form of Garrett Laughlin, who was a bit obnoxious, sure, but who was the only other freshman who had made the team.

And during non-soccer hours, Bram had found himself gravitating more towards Garrett. This actually had less to do with Nick’s introversion and more to do with the fact that Nick seemed to be best friends with, of all people, Simon Spier, who Bram had had a total of four (horrifying) interactions with.

Simon and Nick seemed to have so little in common that Bram could only assume that it was one of those friendships that was probably formed before puberty and identity had started to happen, and had managed to weather all that thus far.

And Bram thought that was kind of cool.

 

What he thought was less cool, though, was Simon coming up to him and Nick and Garrett after practice one day, where the team was waiting on the benches by the parking lot for their rides and buses.

Bram was suddenly very conscious of how sweaty and smelly he probably was.

“What are you still doing here?” Nick asked Simon.

“I had to do a retake for math,” Simon said. “And Mr. Dylan forgot about it, so I had to track him down, and then he had to find a copy of the test. And the thing took fucking forever.”

‘Fuck’ (and all of its variations) was not a word that was permitted anywhere near his mom’s house. She made him download the “clean” versions of hip-hop songs, for goodness’ sake. (Yeah, “goodness,” shut up.) So, it just did not come naturally to him. Every time he had ever tried to say it (all during middle school), it had sounded weird coming out of his mouth, like he had gotten the intonation wrong, or emphasized the wrong words in the sentence or something. So he had decided that his time for being a person who said “fuck” with any regularity had passed, and he was just better off not saying it at all.

Simon sounded like he knew how to say “fuck,” though.

And Bram really, really liked it.

And...he had lost track of the conversation.

“ – Bram?” Simon (!!!) was saying.

Bram looked up. They were all staring at him.

“Oh, uh…sorry. What?”

The three of them burst out laughing at him. He blushed. Great. Simon was laughing at him.

“I can see _you’ve_ been paying attention to our conversation,” Simon said, still laughing a bit. “I asked if you saw the trailer for _Iron Man 3?_ That’s what we were talking about. _”_

Oh. He was asking for Bram’s _opinion_ about something. About an MCU movie. Oh. Oh.

He did have an opinion, a very detailed, conflicted one, actually. (Tony Stark was getting a little boring, to be honest). This should have been his chance. He could impress Simon, who seemed like the sort of person who would be impressed, not put off, by nerdy expertise. And it could provoke an interesting enough conversation that they may be able to continue it in some way in class. And then again after the movie came out. And then later see a different MCU movie together, as friends, obviously.

But all that came out was: “It looks kind of cool. A little redundant, maybe.”

“A little what?” Simon said, frowning at him.

Oh. Excellent. He had used a word Simon didn’t know. Now Simon would think he was a snob who just used big words to look down on other people.

“Um, oh, redundant. It just means, like, unnecessary? Like, you’ve already made the point. You don’t, uh, need to keep doing it. Um.”

“Okaaaaaaaaay,” Simon said, with his eyebrows raised.  Fantastic. “I, uh…still think it will be awesome. Even if it’s, er, redundant.”

Before Bram could agree with him, his bus pulled up.

He had no choice but to stand up, wave awkwardly at them, and flee the scene of the crime.

**Sophomore Year**

**(3)**

When all the AP and Honors English students were told they were going on a (voluntary, but recommended if you didn’t want to spend the class period doing homework in the teachers’ lounge) field trip for the CNN studio tour, Bram had actually been a little bit excited.

He hadn’t gone on a field trip since fifth grade, and honestly, it was kind of cool that something as big as CNN was randomly headquartered right there in Atlanta. They could be going on a far less interesting field trip.

Not that he said this to any of his classmates, most of whom were either whining about the indignity of a change in their routine or just happy about getting out of school for a day. He didn’t hear anyone but Ms. Washington talk about how _interesting_ it might be.

So he chose not to either, but still, he was quietly looking forward to it.

 

Or he was, until he had missed his bus that morning, and his mom had had to drive him to school. It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, except he was basically the last person to get to the buses that were parked on the far side of the parking lot. There were three of them, and he had been assigned to Bus 2.  And Eisner was on Bus 1, Laughlin Bus 3.

When he walked on to the bus (after ignoring the disapproving-of-his-lateness eyebrow of the clipboard wielding parent who checked him in), he was relieved to see that there was a completely empty seat only a few rows from the front.

He had never been desperate to sit in the back, like his classmates all seemed to be. There was less pressure to socialize and gossip (AKA be awkward) up front, where the adults could hear you.

He took a seat by the window, and stared out of it just in time to see…

No. No.

He was not the last person to get there.

‘Go to Bus 3,’ he internally begged Simon Spier, who was walking away from Bus 1 towards his bus. ‘Just keep walking. Don’t stop.’

Of course he stopped, and talked to the same irritated parent that Bram had.

He looked around desperately. There were no other empty seats except the one next to him. In all likelihood, he was going to have to bear watching Simon walk all the way back to the bus looking for a seat, and then finally realize his only choice was next to Bram, and walk all the way back up.

(He would watch, too, out of the corner of his eye. Like a train wreck.)

He didn’t have to, though. Simon walked on, took a quick look around, then sat right next to him.

Right next to him. You know public school bus seats. Their thighs were all but touching. He suddenly felt the existence of every part of his body.

“Hey,” Simon said.

“Hey,” Bram responded.

“I can’t believe I almost missed this thing,” Simon said. “Eve’s mom said we’re leaving in five minutes.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah,” Simon said. “I slept through my alarm. I do that sometimes.”

Bram was not surprised. They had first period together again this year.

“Oh,” was his eloquent response. There was more than one beat of silence.

“So, this’ll be cool right?” Simon tried again. Bram had to admire him for it. “The field trip, I mean. Not the bus ride.”

“Yeah,” Bram agreed, and opted to play it safe. “No desks today.”

“Oh well, yeah, that,” Simon said. “That’s always a plus. But I mean. CNN, you know? It’s kind of a big freaking deal, right? I know that sounds lame. It’s the news. Leah and Nick say it sounds lame. I’ve never been, though.”

“Me neither,” Bram said. And he tried. He really did try and think of something interesting to say. Only, Simon talking had a funny way of making his head empty of all the interesting thoughts it possessed. Every last one. He felt like his embarrassing little crush would be so much more bearable if it was just a physical thing with Simon. But it wasn’t. Simon was unashamedly nerdy and funny and a million more interesting things Bram just had a hard time being.

But he agreed. CNN was boring. News was boring. But the process of gathering and giving that news was way more intriguing. Or he thought that maybe it could be. He wasn’t sure. But it seemed more promising than going to some dead guy’s house or some monument somewhere.

He would’ve said any or all of this to Simon, except he couldn’t think of any of it in that moment because Simon was looking at him with that piecing gaze of his and expecting something clever or at least substantive and –

“Yeah,” he finally said. “It might be interesting.”

“Yeah,” Simon agreed, his eyes flickering away from Bram. Bram turned away a bit, in defeat.

And for a moment it occurred to him that he could say something about remembering how vivid his memory of watching Wolf-whatever-his-name-is on CNN call the election for Obama in 2008. He was only like 10 or something, but he had surrounded by his mom’s family. They had been so happy, because they had been so pessimistic about his chances, and it had been surreal. 

Not always the safest topic, but he could distinctly remember once hearing Simon tell someone that his parents were “super-Democrats” once when their History class was watching the 2012 inauguration instead of actually having class.

There. That would start some sort of conversation, which might keep going even after the short bus ride…

But when he turned back around to Simon, he already had his headphones on. And he didn’t take them off until they got there.

**(4)**

Bram did not like Carys Seward.

And it wasn’t because she was dating Simon. Of course not.

After all, Simon had gone out with Anna Last-Name-He-Didn’t-Remember last year, and it hadn’t bothered him that much. Seriously. Seeing them walking down the hallway holding hands hadn’t been fun or anything, but Anna McSomething was nice. He had no logical reason to hold anything against her. And he really didn’t.

But Carys was another matter.

She just seemed superficial and annoying. Maybe that wasn’t fair, though. His primary association with her was through her ungrammatical Facebook posts.

It was also the way she always seemed to be all over Simon. It’s not that he didn’t like it because he was jealous. It’s just that it seemed so unnecessary.

Did she have to be where he was at all times? Did she have to always be holding his hand or trying to cuddle up next to wherever he was sitting? Simon did not seem too crazy about it either. Or maybe Bram was just seeing what he wanted to –

Not jealous. Just some dude he had a crush on. Not that big of a deal. He’d had lots of crushes on lots of dudes.

Though never for this long.

Anyway.

Bram hated Carys. Er. He didn’t like her, that is.

 

So it was awesome when, about a month before school got out, he got partnered with her for the test-prep Classroom Jeopardy game in first-period History.

And it was even more awesome when Simon walked into class seven minutes late and got added to their group.

Damn it. Was it that hard to wake up to your alarm?

The first Jeopardy question on the PowerPoint was, “Whose assassination is generally said to have started WWI?”

“Who the fuck cares?” Carys whispered to them.

Franz Ferdinand. It was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife. Honestly, they had spent an entire class period talking about it.

He was gratified to see Simon roll his eyes at her ever so slightly.

“Franz Ferdinand?” Bram muttered, as though he weren’t sure.

“Yeah,” Simon said, writing it down.

As the game continued, he didn’t think that he was imagining that Simon was a little grated by Carys’ attitude. She refused to even attempt to help them figure out the answers, keeping her eyes crossed, and making sarcastic comments about how dumb this stupid game was.  Eventually, she just stopped paying attention altogether and started playing with her phone under her desk.

“Sorry,” Simon whispered to him when this happened, as though it were his fault, looking a little embarrassed.

Bram shrugged, wondering why he liked her in the first place.

“Hey, do you know this one?” Simon asked. “I’m bad with dates.”

Bram looked up. The year of the Paris Peace Conference.

“1919,” he said.

Simon wrote it down. “Dude, you seem to know everything,” he said to him, chuckling a bit.

“Oh, sorry,” Bram said, stupidly.

Simon furrowed his brows at him. “For…what?”

Um,” Bram said. “Nothing. I meant, um, thanks. Yeah.”

Simon kept confused eye contact for another beat. Bram felt himself growing red, then looking down.

“Yeah, Bram,” Carys butted in, looking up from her phone. “You do know all this stuff. Maybe I’ll sit next to you during the test.”

Bram flushed even more. People liked to make jokes like this, for some reason.

“That’s not even funny, Carys,” Simon said.

Carys turned to him and narrowed her eyes. ”Whatever,” she said, then turned back to her phone.

Bram wasn’t at all internally rejoicing. Of course not.

Bram almost thanked him. Or made some joke about Carys just cheating off her phone instead of him (though this would have come out garbled and bitter and probably would have been a bad idea).

But the bell rang.

 

That night, when Bram saw “Simon Spier is single” pop up on his Facebook feed, he did not smile.

Not at all.

**Junior Year**

**(5)**

Bram felt that his long-standing crush on Simon Spier would have been far easier to deal if he were sure that Simon was straight.

All right, Simon had dated girls, yes. Bram was probably just being silly. But, there was just a…vibe or something, that Bram got from him that made him not sure.

Simon was in the drama club. Obviously, that did not mean that he was gay. Plenty of straight dudes did drama. Plenty of straight dudes also hung out a lot` with girls, like Simon did with Leah, and now it seemed, the new girl Abby.

But. But. Sometimes it seemed…well, he couldn’t articulate it. He just wasn’t sure.

But if this other gay junior he had been emailing, “Jacques,” could be anybody, why couldn’t it be…?

No. Just no. Girlfriends. And statistics. There were literally a couple hundred junior guys.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t hyperaware of everything that Simon did or said when they were in proximity. This was now quite often because, oh, did he mention, they were eating at the same lunch table every day this year? The politics of lunch table dynamics were weird, but somehow, he and Garrett had ended up sitting with Nick and his friends this year.

Someone up there hated Bram. Or loved him. He could not decide which.

It used to be that his actual interaction with Simon was so far and in-between that he Simon could easily just think of him as that really awkward dude. Now that they sat together every day at a time when socialization was expected, he was certain that there was basically a sign flashing above his head that said 'Super Gay and Super Into Simon.'

 

And all of this was what was on his mind one Friday in mid-October. The night before, he had answered an email from Jacques that had asked him when he had known that he was gay. He had told him a story – with ridiculous detail – about his stepmom’s cousin and his dad’s wedding. He almost couldn’t believe that he had done that. He had never even let himself think all of that to himself with such detail. Anonymity made him brave in a way that he knew that he could never actually be.

But this bravery online had the unintentional effect of making him very paranoid in person. It seemed like every guy that looked at him for more than a second was about to point at him and say, “Hey everyone, Greenfeld got an erection at his dad’s wedding! For a dude! Let’s all point and laugh at him!”

This was silly. But still. Simon Spier being around made these concerns go into overdrive, for some reason.

This was why he was caught off guard when Simon spoke to him, exactly at the time he was thinking about that email.

“ – Bram?” he said. Oh, not again.

“Er, what?” Bram asked.

“I said, are you gonna use that ketchup packet?” Simon said.

“Oh,” Bram said. He looked at his plate. His fries were gone, and he did still have an unused ketchup packet. “Yeah. I mean, no.”

He handed it to Simon across the table. Their fingers touched a bit, and he moved his hand away very quickly.

“Too lazy to walk twenty feet and get another one?” Abby asked Simon.

“Well, Bram wasn’t gonna use his….” Simon trailed off.

Abby rolled her eyes. “You’re too nice, Bram,” she said.

“I really was done,” he told her. It’s not that he didn’t like Abby – the opposite, she seemed cool in general. It was just that she seemed like the type of person who wasn’t afraid to say anything in any situation. This was fine, except when you'd established that you had a sign hanging over your head that said, ‘Super Gay and Super Into Simon.’

“I know,” Abby said, frowning at him slightly. “I was just teasing Simon.”

Bram had known that. He didn’t know why he’d said anything. “Oh. Right.”

There was a pause.

Why was there always a pause?

“How’d you do on the Chem test?” Abby said.

It took Bram a few seconds too long to realize that she was talking to him.

“Fine, I think.”

“Me too,” Abby said. “It was really hard though, so we’ll see. How about you, Simon?"

"Ugh," Simon said. "I don't want to think about it."

"That part with balancing the equations sucked," Bram managed to get out, proud of himself.

"Yeah," Simon said, looking directly at him. Wait, no. Retreat. Retreat. "We get enough math in sixth period, right?"

He'd noticed they had algebra together. They sat on different sides of the classroom and never talked, but he'd noticed.

_Get a hold of yourself, Greenfeld. There are only 30 people in that damn classroom._

"Yeah," Bram agreed. He did not have a hold of himself. Simon was still looking at him, and it almost lasted long enough that it would be weird. He searched his mind for something to say, but yet again, there was just nothing.

Simon looked away.

 

That night, Jacques's reply contained the fascinating detail that he had dated two girls thus far in high school, and was still friends with one of them.

Coincidence. Had to be.

 

**_...and One Time He Actually Did_ **

[Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli](https://www.amazon.com/Simon-vs-Homo-Sapiens-Agenda/dp/006234868X)

**Author's Note:**

> I miss Obama and field trips, but definitely not high school.
> 
> Also, ice-breakers can suck it.
> 
>  
> 
> [come say hey on Tumblr :)](http://paigey-waigey.tumblr.com/)


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